Written When Most Are Proud Cyborgs

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Introduction: Judyth Vary Baker, in her futurist writings, focuses on several scenarios as a result of 21st century genetic engineering, population pressures, and the erosion of human freedom in favor of profit for a few, as religious ideals are destroyed, patriotism wll be called nationalism, and a one world order will make revolutions in the future impossible because of technological control of the populace.
One possible scenario is that future rulers of the earth's population will live far longer than today, and will be able to deeply entrench their power, by technologically-engineered enhancements, from artificial organs to new brain cells. The result is a human who should 'live' to be 400 or more years old, before the will to live might be reduced enough to permit its self-termination or termination by the state (as its ability to be dominant, and to defend itself as valuable to its economy) recedes. The poem below is directed to such personages of the future, should they come to exist. It is assumed that more and more humans will demand the right to live longer. They may regret it. What conditions 'enhanced' human beings live under might be horrendous, if they are exploited because their bodies no longer 'wear out' and their brains can be dimmed, their thoughts and emotions controlled by drugs, and the need for sleep eliminated in favor of more hours of productive labor. Population control will certainly be practiced, and the birth of an elite-ruler child will probably be that of an even more greatly-enhanced creature. To call these rulers and elite personages 'human beings' after centuries of genetic engineering and artificial limbs, organs and brain control is exercised upon them is a matter of conjecture.


WRITTEN WHEN MOST ARE PROUD CYBORGS:In pleasantries, orchestrated on our screens,
We live the lives of many men and women,
As if sex could be! We grow, composed of well-cooked pablum
Eaten between long work hours, digested pleasantly.
In a fetal coil, I rest, my optic eye
Doesn’t blink at the silver reticules of my mind:
My body well knit by well-knit engineers,
This me-model makes real tears, running from my eyes.
Of course I’m human – hammered out in school,
Wearing what Designers Club tells me to;
You and I, we can adjust ourselves with tools,
Look down upon the Primitives -- those old fools.
Insulated from all microbial bio-terrors,
Safe from the brute, the thorn, the flawed flower
Blooming wild; we -- kept safe – know no variant weather,
Pity the Primitive, exposed to flood and laser-tower.
Did you see those messages, scrawled upon a wall,
Comparing us with vipers at Adam’s Fall?
There’s not an original thought in what he thinks:
That purist Primitive! His raw flesh stinks!
Computers say it best, and yet, I see
Something –compelling--- in his graffiti:
“O song, sing forth unto the endless skies--
O hear, created stars! You long have looked
Upon all who weep, who ever made outcry,
And wrote it down, in God’s forgotten book.”

JVB March 5, 2001 Dallas, Texas